SaaStr Podcast #150: Paul Albright, Board Member @ Clarizen Discusses Why It Is Harder To Go Enterprise Down Than SMB Up

Welcome to Episode 150! Paul Albright is one of the valley’s most experienced SaaS execs with extensive operational and capital management experience, including 3 IPOs. Most recently Paul was the Founder & CEO @ Captora, the marketing acceleration software solution that raised over $25m in VC funding from the likes of NEA and Bain Capital Ventures. Prior to Captora, Paul was Chief Revenue Officer at Marketo, where he drove the overall revenue strategy across sales and marketing that delivered global revenue growth over 100% year-over-year, from $14m to $58m. In a similar position at SuccessFactors, he grew revenues to more than $200m and over 80% year-over-year growth. Previously, Paul led worldwide marketing at NetApp and at Informatica, which he joined pre-revenue through their successful IPO. If that was not enough he has also served as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Greylock.

In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:

* How Paul made his way into the world with the likes of SuccessFactors and Marketo? What were his big lessons from seeing both companies scale into hyper-growth mode?

* Does Paul agree with Dave Kellogg in stating, “CAC/LTV is the single most important metric for SaaS startups?” What other metrics must all VPs of Demand Gen and Sales be watching constantly?

* What does an efficient sales and marketing engine look like? What are the core components to build that? What are the requirements to both run this engine and scale it quickly? How does the growth of this engine affect hiring in other parts of the business?

* Why does Paul believe that it is much harder to go SMB up than enterprise down? What are the changes that are required on both ends? For this in “no man’s land of pricing” what does an efficient sales process timeline look like from lead to conversion?

60 Second SaaStr:

* How does Paul think about picking the investors he works with?

* Is customization always wrong?

* What is “good sales rep productivity” to Paul?

* What does Paul know now that he wishes he had known at the beginning?